ABSTRACT
What would happen to logocentrism, to the great philosophical systems, to the order of the world in general if the rock upon which they founded this church should crumble?
Sounds, voices, languages are always inscribed in places. Under the signs of language, power and ‘English’, the above quotations – citations from
the once ignored peripheries of the Caribbean, India, Australia and Algeria – throw up fundamental questions in an epoch of postcolonialism. These are encountered in the implosion of British (and Western) culture under the impact of its inhabitation by other voices, histories and experiences. In the real and imaginary journeys that constitute the modern maps of metropolitan cultures there emerge linguistic and musical islands that form chains of identity based on very different rhythms of time and being. The accents of Empire that return in the voices of post-colonial subjects – both travelling from the ‘periphery’ and erupting at the centre – find expression in a cross-cultural cosmopolitanism that reworks and rewrites the once hidden histories of black Atlanticism and imperial diaspora in the grammar of modern nomadic identities. As testimony there exist the noted literary voyages of Derek Walcott and Salman Rushdie, the deliberately dislocating dub poetry of Big Youth, Michael Smith and Linton Kwesi Johnson, the trope of journey and transformation so central to the recent emergence of black women’s writings in the United States and the Caribbean, the more local signature of post-realist black British cinema and photography, and the ubiquitous mobility of black electronic riddims world-wide.5
